Graphic Design Blog is a blog about general graphic design, learning graphic design, logo design, advertising, packaging and illustration. (via Mowser)

If your Apple Mac Died Could you Easily Carry on Working?

By Tara: Freelance Designer | Published: February 16, 2012

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed follow me ontwitter or download my FREE beginners guide to creating your own WordPress Blog

Without getting into a Mac versus PC debate, Macs are great when they work and fortunately don’t usually give you too much trouble, but what if yours stopped working tomorrow? Even if you have a back up of all your work think about the time it would take to get all your software, fonts and work loaded up on to a new machine and working. That’s where a FREE piece of software I recently discovered called Carbon Copy Cloner could step in and save the day.

I discovered Carbon Copy Cloner when I had to upgrade my boyfriend’s Mac (my old one) and in order to do that the disk had to be reformatted first. Carbon Copy Cloner let’s you make a bootable copy of your Mac hard drive onto a external FireWire or USB hard drive. Once the bootable drive is made this means you could then connect it to another Mac and boot off it as your startup disk and it would contain all your files along with you applications etc.

Just like Time Machine you can also set Carbon Copy Cloner to do scheduled backups too. Previously I had always preferred to do manual back ups so I could swap my back up drives round. Now I am using Carbon Copy Cloner with a FireWire Drive and then doing a less regular manual back up that I don’t keep in the house.

If you are thinking of upgrading your system software and want a copy of your existing system to fall back on or just want keep a rescue drive available, take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com/.

This page contained an embedded video. Click here to view it.

Posted in Design Programmes, General Graphic Design | Tagged Apple Mac, Back up, backing up, Carbon Copy Cloner | 2 Comments

Google Plus for Freelance Designers

By Tara: Freelance Designer | Published: February 9, 2012

You just start getting the hang of Facebook and use a bit of Twitter for marketing for your freelance design business and then Google Plus arrives and throws another spanner in the works. So now we all have another social network to learn how to use, which is why Alex Mathers has created a new Book called Google+ Course for freelancers, entrepreneurs and small businesses which you can find at http://www.redlemonclub.com/googleplusguide. Alex was kind enough to give me a free copy as I had reviewed his previous book on design promotion and enjoyed it.

The book is made up of 3 Parts:

Part 1 – An overview of marketing for the freelance designer or design business owner

This is a great refresher into marketing yourself as a graphic designer especially if you haven’t read Alex’s previous book and covers things like: knowing your target market, setting up an online portfolio, a quick word on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Mailing Lists.

Part 2 – Setting up and and how to use Google Plus for your graphic design business

This second part features screen shots and text showing you how to get started on Google Plus. This includes tips on uploading photos to use as a portfolio and how to organise your circles (these are a way of grouping different people together). I also learned a great tip here on how to use circles to collect together articles you want to save and refer to later (great for bloggers).

Part 3 – Building a network on Google Plus

The third and final part of this book is more about how to use Google plus to build a network for your design business, how to find influential people to engage with and how to make yourself appear an authority in your field.

Is the Book “Google Plus for Freelancers” for you?

If you haven’t yet got yourself on Google plus, or have just started but want to kick start your knowledge, then this book is for you. Just as with Alex’s last book this book is straight forward good information and no fluff.

Find out more about the book here http://www.redlemonclub.com/googleplusguide it’s currently on promotion for $29 until Friday 10th February 2012

PS: you can find me on Google Plus here (my personal profile) and my Graphic Design Blog Page here, IÂ hope to see you over there

Disclosure: I was given a review copy of this book, the link to the book in this post is an affiliate link, which means if you buy through my link I will earn a commission (it won’t cost you any more).

Posted in Freelance Graphic Design, General Graphic Design, Marketing and Design | 3 Comments

Free Graphic Design Software for when you are Learning Graphic Design

By Tara: Freelance Designer | Published: February 7, 2012

If you are learning graphic design and haven’t got a big budget, the first investment I would suggest is a layout pad and pencil/pen (yes – seriously). The most important thing will always be your ideas and the design rather than the tools you use to implement them. However when you are ready to take your ideas on to the computer there are a couple of good websites you may want to try to find free graphic design software as alternatives to paid commercial programs.

Alternative to

http://www.alternativeto.net
On this site you have a couple of options, if you have something specific you are looking for – type in the mainstream commercial design program ie. Dreamweaver and then it will give you a list of alternatives (both paid and free).

To narrow it down to just Free and Open source use the drop “Filter by License” menu. You can also filter by platform – Mac, PC or Linux.

With “Alternative to” you also have the option to browse through software by choosing your platform from the top menu and then choosing the type of software you are looking for.

Osalt

http://www.osalt.com

Here you can simply search for the commercial graphics software (eg. Photoshop) that you are trying to find an open source alternative to. When you have found it select it and underneath you will find a list of alternatives along with which platform they are available for Mac, Windows or Linux.